Power Consumption
To test for power consumption we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Furmark which was ran for 15 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.
As you can see above, the power figures were fairly good considering this card is overclocked. We would however have liked to see much better figures than the reference GTX 980 as this card produced near identical results to that of the NVIDIA flagship component.
Temperature
To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests, we would normally run Furmark for 20 minutes, taking the absolute maximum temperature attained however we found that this throttled the card and resulted in spurious results. So we set Heaven running continuously for 20 minutes and used this as a temperature result.
Wow! We already knew that the DirectCU II cooler was amongst the best there is but the card barely budged above 65c during games and to get it to do so meant firing up Furmark. The fans kicked in at 67c which kept the temperatures at 68c or below which is a remarkable achievement.
Acoustics
0dB? ASUS have to be joking right? Well yes and no. The card is indeed a true 0dB component however this is only when idle or doing non-GPU tasks. Fire up a game and you could be forgiven in thinking that that cards fans have broken. We initially thought this too however at 65c the fans will start to spin, first one, then the other. Despite our best efforts we could not get the card to go much higher than 68c so under normal operating conditions, with the fans spinning so low you will not hear this over normal case fans. The only time you will hear it is if you adjust the fan profile which can get a little irritating when raised above 60% but certainly nothing to write home about.
